12'9" x 19'4" Persian Heriz Rug | Ivory Field, Navy Medallion | Dense Wool, 1980s

At 12'9" x 19'4" this is a palace format piece, close to 250 square feet of hand-knotted wool, and it is drawn with a level of refinement you rarely meet at this scale. The ivory field is unusual on its own, since most Heriz weaving of the 1980s leaned on brick red grounds, and here the pale ground lets every stem, leaf and palmette read clearly from across the room. The pile is dense and heavy, the cotton foundation is tight and flat, and the rug lies straight without a ripple. Pieces this large are the hardest thing a village loom ever attempts, which is why good examples sit at the top of the market for oversize Persian rugs. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Heriz architecture, a large stepped central medallion with pendants running north and south and 4 corner spandrels, but the drawing inside it is far more curvilinear than the blunt village style. A rose ground cartouche sits at the dead center, framed in ivory scrolling brackets, holding an 8 petal rosette of orange, navy and pale blue with olive green leaves radiating out. Around it, a broad navy field is divided by rust colored strapwork into diamond compartments, each filled with small floral sprays and serrated oak leaves. The ivory field beyond carries big arching vines, feathered sickle leaves and open palmettes that mirror each other across both axes, and the teal green spandrels repeat the same vocabulary in a heavier scale. The main border runs on navy with alternating rosettes and curled leaf cartouches, fenced by olive gold guard stripes filled with tiny 4 petal flowers.

A Palette of Ivory, Navy, Salmon and Teal

The ground is a warm ivory with a faint cream to sand movement through it, the kind of gentle abrash that only hand-spun wool and vat dyeing produce. Against it the medallion field reads as a deep inky navy, almost black in the shadowed photographs and clearly blue in daylight, while the strapwork and the larger leaves are salmon and rust with a soft coral cast where the pile catches light. The central cartouche is a dusty rose, unusual and quite beautiful next to the navy that surrounds it. Supporting tones do most of the charm: olive and moss green in the small leaves, burgundy in the flower heads, pale sky blue and light celadon in the feathered leaf tips, apricot and orange in the rosette, and clean ivory outlining that separates every color from its neighbor. The corner spandrels bring in a muted teal green, which cools the whole composition and keeps the reds from dominating.

Heriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, on the slopes below Mount Sabalan, where mineral-rich water and famously tough highland wool give the pile its hard-wearing, slightly glassy handle. Weavers there work from memory and a simple cartoon rather than a full workshop drawing, which is why standard Heriz pieces come out angular and straight-lined. This rug shows what the best Heriz looms could do when a proper designer was involved: flowing vines, rounded brackets and balanced floral drawing held across nearly 20 feet of length without the pattern drifting. The knotting seen on the reverse is even and tight, the pile is left full and dense, and the cotton warps and wefts give the piece the weight and stability that a room of this size needs. Woven in the 1980s and kept in perfect condition since, it has decades of service left in it.